All your feeds, one edition. Aggrega is a fast, lightweight desktop feed reader with an editorial, magazine-style design. It runs entirely on your machine, with no account and no cloud sync. It's written in Rust with a Slint UI.
| Dark theme | Adding a source |
|---|---|
 |
 |
- No login, local only. Your subscriptions and read state live in a single SQLite file on your disk.
- No telemetry, tracking or analytics. There is no telemetry, tracking or analytics code in Aggrega. The only network traffic is fetching the feeds, thumbnails and articles you asked for, plus, only while Settings → Sync is open, talking to other copies of Aggrega on your local network. Nothing is reported anywhere.
- Unlimited sources. RSS 0.9x/1.0/2.0, Atom and JSON Feed are all supported.
- Smart "Add source". Paste a feed URL, or just a website such as
theverge.com. Aggrega finds the feed from the page's<link rel="alternate">tags or from common paths like/feedand/rss.xml. - OPML import and export. Bring your subscriptions over from Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, Miniflux or any other reader: Settings → Import & export, or Import from OPML on the welcome screen. Folders are flattened, sources you already follow are skipped, and Aggrega tells you how many were added, skipped or couldn't be reached. Export writes every source to a standard OPML 2.0 file.
- Sync between computers. Moving to another machine? Open Settings → Sync on both: each lists the other copies of Aggrega on the same network (or type the other computer's address, shown on its Sync tab). Pull from one and, after you confirm, its sources, articles and read state replace everything on this computer; your theme stays. It works between macOS and Linux. Nothing listens or announces itself unless the Sync tab is on screen, and the transfer is not encrypted, so use it on networks you trust.
- Newest posts first. The list merges every source into one feed sorted by date. You can also focus on a single source from the sidebar.
- Works offline. Everything you've downloaded, including stories and thumbnails, stays readable without a connection. When no source can be reached, Aggrega says it's offline instead of flagging your sources as broken, and it retries on the next refresh.
- Refreshes on launch and on demand. Cached articles show up immediately, and fresh ones are fetched in parallel in the background. Aggrega sends conditional requests (ETag / Last-Modified), so feeds that haven't changed cost almost nothing.
- Unread highlighting. Unread stories get a red dot before the kicker and a black-weight headline. Read ones drop to a lighter grey headline with a dimmed photo. Each source shows its unread count. The Unread tab is the default view; stories you read there slide out of the list right away. All shows everything, and Mark all as read clears the view.
- Reader view. Clicking an article opens it inside Aggrega as a clean, single-column page with its headline, lead photo, text, quotes, lists and pictures, and marks it as read. When the feed only carries a summary, Aggrega fetches the article's page and pulls out the story, leaving menus, share bars and comments behind. The result is saved, so the story opens instantly next time, even offline. Read on … or
Oopens the original in your browser. Hover a story in the list to toggle read/unread without opening it. - Thumbnails. Thumbnails are pulled from the feed's media tags or the article's first image. They are shrunk and cached on disk, and they fade in without blocking the UI.
- Editorial design. Newsprint paper and ink colours, heavy serif headlines (Source Serif 4), small-caps kickers in each source's colour (Libre Franklin), hairline rules, and a lead story at the top of the list. The fonts are bundled, so the app looks the same on every machine.
- Opening sequence. At launch the masthead is set in about 2.8 seconds and then lifts like a curtain. Click or press any key to skip it.
- Fits the window. The layout adapts to the window width. Narrow windows get a slimmer sidebar, tighter margins, smaller headlines and thumbnails, and wide ones cap the column at a comfortable reading width.
- Custom title bar. The window has no system frame. Drag the header or the sidebar masthead to move it, double-click to maximise, and resize from any edge.
- Light and dark themes. Aggrega follows your desktop by default. The toggle cross-fades the whole UI and remembers your choice.
- Fluid animations. Rows glide in, thumbnails zoom gently on hover, headlines turn red, the tab underline and theme switch use spring easing, and a red progress sweep runs while refreshing.
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
F5 / Ctrl+R |
Refresh all sources |
Ctrl+N |
Add a source |
Ctrl+, |
Open settings |
Enter |
Confirm in the "Add source" dialog |
Esc |
Close dialogs, or close the reader |
Backspace / ← |
Back to the list (reader) |
↑ / ↓, Space / Shift+Space, PgUp / PgDn, Home / End |
Scroll the article (reader) |
O |
Open the original page in your browser (reader) |
M |
Toggle read / unread (reader) |
| any key / click | Skip the opening animation |
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel rustup fontconfig freetype2 libxkbcommon wayland libglvnd
rustup default stable
cargo run --releaseTo install it as a proper package, with a launcher entry and icon:
cd packaging/arch && makepkg -siIf Settings → Sync can't find or reach the other computer, a firewall is probably blocking it. Some Arch-based distros, such as CachyOS, turn on ufw by default. Sync needs UDP 47811 (discovery) and TCP 47812 (transfer) open:
sudo ufw allow 47811/udp && sudo ufw allow 47812/tcp
# or, with firewalld:
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=47811/udp --add-port=47812/tcp && sudo firewall-cmd --reloadIf you only open TCP 47812, you can still sync by typing the other computer's address.
docs/BUILDING.md has the full build, run, test and packaging guide, plus troubleshooting.
Each release run builds Aggrega.app for Apple silicon Macs (M series, macOS 11+), published as the disk image aggrega-<version>-macos-arm64.dmg in the run's artifacts. Intel Macs aren't supported. The app isn't notarized, so the first launch is blocked by Gatekeeper: click Open Anyway under System Settings → Privacy & Security, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Aggrega.app. See docs/BUILDING.md to build it yourself.
| What | Linux | macOS |
|---|---|---|
| Subscriptions, articles, read state, settings | ~/.local/share/aggrega/aggrega.db |
~/Library/Application Support/aggrega/aggrega.db |
| Thumbnail cache (safe to delete) | ~/.cache/aggrega/thumbs/ |
~/Library/Caches/aggrega/thumbs/ |
On Linux, both paths honour XDG_DATA_HOME / XDG_CACHE_HOME. Setting AGGREGA_HOME keeps everything in that one directory instead (aggrega.db and thumbs/), which is handy for a separate or throwaway profile. Settings → About shows the paths in use, with buttons to open each folder. To start fresh, quit Aggrega and delete the two directories. Read articles older than 90 days are pruned automatically.
- docs/BUILDING.md: prerequisites, dev and release builds, tests, packaging, troubleshooting
- docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: how the code is organised, the threading model, the storage schema and performance notes
- CONTRIBUTING.md: how to report bugs, propose changes and open a pull request
aggrega/
├── Cargo.toml # dependencies + release profile (LTO, strip)
├── build.rs # compiles the .slint UI into Rust at build time
├── src/
│ ├── main.rs # window setup, UI callback wiring
│ ├── app.rs # app state, UI actions, background jobs
│ ├── fetch.rs # HTTP: feeds, subscribing, pages, images
│ ├── feed.rs # feed parsing, thumbnails, feed discovery
│ ├── html.rs # HTML tokenizer, HTML→text
│ ├── pool.rs # scoped thread pool
│ ├── reader.rs # reader view: HTML → text blocks, article extraction
│ ├── db.rs # SQLite storage
│ ├── opml.rs # OPML import (parsing) and export (writing)
│ ├── sync.rs # LAN sync: UDP beacon discovery, TCP snapshot transfer
│ ├── thumbs.rs # thumbnail download/resize/disk cache, reader pictures
│ └── text.rs # truncation, relative dates, avatar colours
├── ui/
│ ├── app.slint # main window
│ ├── theme.slint # fonts, design tokens (light/dark), icon set
│ ├── widgets.slint # buttons, tabs, switch, window controls…
│ ├── sidebar.slint # sources list
│ ├── article-card.slint
│ ├── reader.slint # in-app reader view
│ ├── dialogs.slint # add-source, remove and sync confirmation modals
│ ├── settings.slint # settings modal (tabbed: Import & export, Sync, About)
│ └── icons/ # SVG icons
├── assets/
│ ├── aggrega.svg # app icon
│ └── fonts/ # bundled OFL fonts (see FONTS.md)
├── packaging/ # .desktop file, Arch PKGBUILD, macOS .app bundling
└── docs/
- More build targets: Windows (#3), macOS polish (#4: title bar,
Cmdshortcuts, signing), AppImage (#5), Flatpak (#6) - Folders/categories (#8), search (#9)
- Periodic background refresh (#10)
- Next/previous story from the reader (#11)
Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get started.
Aggrega is released under the MIT License.
Slint itself is available under GPLv3, a royalty-free license for desktop apps (which requires Slint attribution, such as an "About Slint" notice or badge), or a commercial license. Your choice for Aggrega decides which of these you can use. See https://slint.dev/pricing.